Tag Archive for ‘Local Ecological Knowledge’
Un – Belize – able: botanical autopsia and local knowledge
“Hello plant”
Take a step back, look.
“What do you look like?” “What’s your texture? What’s the colour of your bark?”
OK, so I’m asking a plant questions. Perhaps worse, I’m asking a plant questions in my own head. Apparently that’s what a two-week NERC Advanced Training Short Course (ATSC) from RBG Edinburgh does to you. During this training, I expected to gain knowledge about different tropical plant families. What I did not expect was to gain a fairly individual set of personal skills to identify plants. What surprised me even more was that I gained insight into a much less tangible aspect of my PhD research.